Every year, I put out some kind of year-end list, all the while wondering what it means. Why those artists and not countless others? This time around, the answer was simple; they’re the artists who, for one reason or another, have helped me live. This year, I also wanted to relay this exercise to the artists in question, so I asked them “Which artist made your life better in 2015?” Here are their answers.​Sasha Kleinplatz, choreographer, L’échauffement (Département de danse de l’UQAM)“The facilitators and the participants of the Get B(l)ack research project at Impulstanz in Vienna, Austria. This project focused on Black Aesthetics and Contemporary Dance. We looked at Afro-Futurism, queer black dance, black feminist thought, the Black Lives Matter movement, and white privilege, among a ton of other things. There were many arguments, tears, and deeply awkward/alienating moments. What blew my mind is that everyone stayed and worked their asses off to find a way to talk and work together, no one gave up, and many people had every right to. The facilitators, Thomas D. Frantz and Keith Hennesey, were so firm, so clear and so gracious, refused to humour any white fragility, and at the same time they were extremely patient and remained determined to keep the group moving forward in thought and action. In a year where I felt a lot of confusion and disenchantment about the narrowness of the contemporary dance milieu (artistically, philosophically, and politically), I was so grateful to have this wakeup call that IT IS possible to work rigorously and ethically. And that there is a community of people doing it; we just have to keep finding each other.”

“This past year was difficult for me; 1) as a human being dealing with mental illness, and 2) as an artist trying to fight against the creative oppression of my mental illness. The following artists have been important to me throughout 2015 not only as a form of relief, but more importantly for offering profound inspiration. In the fall, I rediscovered the brilliance of Magma. While introducing their album 1001° Centigrades to my friend in the midst of an exceptionally beautiful psilocybin trip, I had an epiphany! I felt as if I was discovering this masterful work all over again for the first time. The musical ideas were so inventive and creative. We both were so mind-blown that we ended up listening to the album repeatedly. I was fascinated by the unique and insanely creative singing of Klaus Blasquiz. In ‘contemporary classical’ music, I became entranced by Claude Vivier's work. For the first time, I felt I reached a profound understanding of his sonic expressions. These inspirations have heavily influenced my most recent compositional efforts for acoustic ensembles. Punk has had a huge presence in my life this year: artists like Flipper and No Trend; the gorgeously filth-obsessed, uncompromising work of Lydia Lunch; the deathrock pioneers Christian Death and Mighty Sphincter; the legendary Iggy Pop and the Stooges; hardcore bands Minor Threat and Bad Brains; anarcho-punk artists Crass and Flux of Pink Indians; the avant-garde punk experimentalists This Heat. Punk has always been at the foundation of my artistic mind ever since it took over my life as a teenager, but the fact that it has repossessed such a high place in my art diet might just be the most important and impactful thing to artistically happen to me this year. There is one more artist I'd like to bring praise to, an ensemble with whom I've been enamored for years; CAN have become one of my most cherished musical inspirations. Their sound, even 40+ years later, still manages to be incredibly fresh and insanely ahead of its time. Their mixture of extensive improvisation, acousmatic music elements and monotonous trance-like grooves; their exploration of noise, electronic soundscapes and unconventional sonic textures; the level of ingenuity in how they smash genre boundaries while sticking to a traditional rock ensemble instrumentation; the magnificent Damo Suzuki's exciting explorations of new expressive vocal possibilities (singing in improvised gibberish, electronically manipulating his voice, using unconventional sounds). CAN has enhanced my life this year more than any other artist and I have a feeling they'll keep doing so. There's still so much I feel I can learn from their art.”

“Over the past year I was struck numerous times by the work of photographer Niki Feijen, whose studies of abandoned places are like the graveyards of Gregory Crewdson photos. There's a sense of lost presence in his work, yet somehow a new presence, or the feeling that you, the viewer, are the only one present. There is a compulsion to look and to be within the photos, which has been an interesting experience to me. I think the bigger effect is that this work has inspired imagination within me in ways that were more familiar when I was really young – mystery, the unknown, and the idea of building something imaginary out of that in whatever way I wish.”​Anders Yates, writer & performer, Playday Mayday (Wildside Festival)

“The Pajama Men. I've been a fan of theirs for at least a decade and they've been a huge influence on Uncalled For's style, and this past March I was once again able to watch them perform together live for the first time in years and it was pure magic. They know how to play with each other in a way that is both disciplined and reckless and clearly fun. I got to enjoy the perfect mix of classic sketches I loved and new material I got to discover and a couple minutes of one just spanking the other. What more could I possibly want?”

From March 25 to 27, dancer Anne Thériault will fill Ashlea Watkin’s shoes (and mask?) in Nicolas Cantin’s Klumzy. Here is what I had to say about the show when I saw it at Festival TransAmériques back in June.

Spectacle. “Spectacle,” Ashlea Watkin repeats throughout Klumzy, as if to remind us that nothing should be taken at face value specifically because everything is face value. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe it’s ironic since, as usual, show producer Nicolas Cantin does as little as he needs, giving us the opposite of the spectacle, antitheater. By saying the word, Watkin is transforming the context into content. The same could be said of Cantin’s presence onstage in this mostly-solo quasi-duo. It is as if he does not want us to forget that, while the show might be biographically about Watkin, it is his show and therefore is just as much about him. Maybe even more so. Watkin tells us that she used to be into Aerosmith, but that’s not the music Cantin plays on his laptop. When he plays punk rock, he’s the one dancing along to it, not her. By being onstage, Cantin is refusing the purity of biography. “It’s an image,” Watkin says. On a small square screen, a picture of her is projected. “It’s an image of me.” She might be talking about the picture, but she could also be talking about her live body, also mediated. “It’s me.” It is while wearing a mask of an old bald man that she is looking at her picture, creating a distance between the self and its representation at the same as she blurs the line between them.The recording of her voice has been manipulated, possibly speeded up, has a higher pitch certainly, has been chipmunked, rendered childlike. There is again a distance created between Watkin now and as a child – introducing the idea that maybe our memory should not be fully trusted – as well as a blurring between the two. That we dialogue with our selves only proves the inconsistency of said self; otherwise it would speak with a single voice. There is always something off in Cantin’s world, courtesy of aforementioned antitheater. Watkin speaks into a microphone, but she’s whispering. She’s doing so at the back of the stage, her back turned to the audience. Her microphone is on a stand, but she’s holding the stand sideways, so that it’s not resting on its legs. Wearing her mask – deceptively realistic, especially in soft light – she keeps opening her mouth slightly, as though chewing. The effect is unsettling. We know it’s a mask, and yet our mind constantly lapses into viewing it as a real face. To qualify as realistic, something has to be fake. At the end, Atkin pulls on a string to make the front legs of a chair hover slightly above the floor. This is as much magic as Cantin is willing to give us.March 25-27 at 8pmUsine Cwww.usine-c.com514.521.4493Tickets: 32$ / Students or 30 years old and under: 24$

Benoît Lachambre’s Snakeskins: because you can only accuse Lachambre of being so hit-or-miss due to his uncompromising commitment to his artistic pursuits… and he’s due for a hit. (October 10-12, Usine C) Nicolas Cantin’s Grand singe: because nobody else manages to pack as much punch by doing so little. (October 30-November 1, Usine C) Brian Brooks’s Big City & Motor: because Brooks explores concepts that only push his choreography further into the physical world, turning the human body into little more than a machine. (November 22-25, Tangente) Karine Denault’s PLEASURE DOME: because we haven’t seen her work since 2007, when she presented the intimate Not I & Others using only half of the small Tangente space, dancing with humility, as though the line between performer and spectator simply hinged on a matter of perspective. (February 6-9, Agora de la danse) Pieter Ampe & Guilherme Garrido’s Still Standing You: because Ampe & Garrido have created one of the most compelling shows of the past few years, a dense study of masculinity and friendship covered with a thick layer of Jackass trash. (February 12-16, La Chapelle) Sharon Eyal & Gai Bachar’s Corps de Walk: because it’s the first time we get to see a work by Eyal in six years, when she blew us away with a non-stop human parade that was decidedly contemporary in its transnationalism and use of everyday movements like talking on cell phones. (February 28-March 2, Danse Danse) Mélanie Demers’s Goodbye: because, much like David Lynch did with Inland Empire, Demers demonstrated that an artist doesn’t need to instill suspension of disbelief in its audience to work, that dance can be powerful as dance just as film can be powerful as film. (March 20-22, Usine C) Maïgwenn Desbois’s Six pieds sur terre: because Desbois demonstrated that one doesn’t need to sacrifice art in order to make integrated dance. (March 21-24, Tangente) Yaëlle & Noémie Azoulay’s Haute Tension: because Yaëlle Azoulay came up with the most exclamative piece ever presented at the Biennales de Gigue Contemporaine. (March 28-30, Tangente) Dorian Nuskind-Oder’s Pale Water: because with simple means Nuskind-Oder manages to create everyday magic. (May 10-12, Tangente)

There’s a knife on my desk, next to my computer. When I’m done writing this review, I’ll take the knife and stab myself repeatedly. Don’t worry. It’s a retractable blade, a plastic knife.

Ashlea Watkin (sublime, as always) is quite poised when she walks onstage for Nicolas Cantin’s Belle manière. She is wearing a nice black dress. But something’s off. She steps into black shoes, men’s shoes, but doesn’t even bother putting them on correctly. She simply lets her heel come down on the back of the shoe. She picks up two plastic objects: little, round, white. She shakes her head from side to side, brings her hands to her face: squeak! It’s tragic, it’s comic, it’s a farce.

She hugs the air, but having no one there to stop her arms, the embrace sends her stumbling across the floor.

There is someone else there – Normand Marcy – but he simply stands there and looks on, comatose. Watkin attempts to make him sing, but to no avail. No sound out of him, ever. He refuses to play her games. So Watkin extends her fist in front of an audience member, asking them to sing instead. The awkwardness is transferred from the couple’s relationship onto the audience.

Watkin’s upper body collapses, her head crashing down to her stomach. Marcy remains still. Once again, we find the same characters as in Cantin’s previous piece, Grand singe, even though they are played by different performers. The man is passive, the woman relatively more hysterical. A relationship looked at under unflattering neon lights.

Cantin does introduce a new element into this work: a few magic tricks of which the performers barely attempt to mask the inner workings. They look cheap, a bit like how one sometimes feels when looking back at love. Why did it look so magical back then? Or like this red balloon tied to Marcy’s body that follows him along, trailing on the ground: whimsical at first, then fragile, and ultimately just ridiculous.

These are sad clowns. Marcy might look like a victim, but he is only a willing one, more a victim of his own passivity than of Watkin. The egg, the cream pie, the shaken soda bottle, he sees it all coming, but he has no will of his own. We feel better about not being in such a relationship. We feel better that we’re not the only ones who’ve been in such a relationship.

Cantin is still working out his issues with women, but he undeniably does it in a theatrically compelling way. No other artist manages to get so much out of so little. You’ll be just as shaken up as that soda bottle by the time you get out of there.

And maybe love is like that soda bottle; you think you’re going to get something sweet, but it’s really just an explosion waiting to happen, leaving you with nothing but a sticky mess.